DLC For Dark Souls II? Not In This (Brief) Lifetime

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The Dark Souls series is known for throwing as many obstacles as possible in the way of your happiness and physical well-being, but apparently DLC won’t be one of them. While most games slather themselves with the stuff like Hedonism Bot on holiday, Dark Souls II will walk the path of the spartan. It will bring with it only what’s necessary for a complete game. And nothing more.

From Software’s Takeshi Miyazoe wrote off DLC as frivolous to his series in an interview with Edge:

“For Dark Souls II, we don’t even expect any additional downloadable content because we want to deliver a full game, the full experience, to fans who purchase the package from day one. We did do additional content for Dark Souls, but generally downloadable content for Dark Souls II is not really being considered. Buy the package and you’ll get the full experience, and you’ll have as much fun as anybody else. Spending a couple dollars on certain items does not help the experience. So no free-to-play yet!”

On top of that, he promised that Dark Souls II’s PC port won’t be the slapdash twigs-and-duct-tape effort that its predecessor was, confessing that the first game was rushed to our platform of choice with little regard for customization or control. “For Dark Souls II we are developing on PC from the beginning,” he explained. “We realise what PC games typically require, and I can assure you that the PC version of Dark Souls II will be a good PC experience for PC gamers.”

So basically, good news all around. As for the game itself, Rich came away with mixed feelings after taking it for a spin fatal roll off a bridge at Eurogamer Expo. If you’re a casual fan, you might not even notice all the under-the-hood tweaks, but experts beware: you will die, but for reasons that may cause you profound emotional turmoil.

Dark Souls II will come to PC a few weeks after its early March consolebox release date. Are you prepared?

Almost a pity really as Dark Souls is the only game I can think of that sees fit to actively hide the DLC from the player. But then I have no idea if it cost money on the consoles.
Hopefully this is just referring to microtransactions, pre order bonuses, real-money-sword-of-plus-one-face-stabbing and the like as opposed to DS1’s really rather nice Artorias of the Abyss.

I don’t think he means invaders, which are considered a legitimate part of the game. Gankers are generally those who summon phantoms in pvp areas generally regarded as “dueling locations” so as to out number and get the jump on people entering their game world with intention of partaking in a fair fight. It’s not that it isn’t a part of the game, but rather that it is exploiting certain conventions of the metagame. It can be a touch irritating, but I actually enjoy some gank attempts, as it instantly turns what are usually fair fights into a no-holds-barred, dirty, running brawl across the entire map, which is it’s own kind of fun.

I’ve never had a problem with oolacil magic, it kind of feels like it was required to even make straight mage characters viable in PVP. Wrath of God spam and Tranquil Walk of Peace, that’s real douchebaggery. But hey, all’s fair in hollowing and undeath.

I have to disagree on the first part. As someone who has pvp’d as a mage (50+ int) with a moonlight greatsword, i did not feel any need for Oolacile magic… Crystal magic was good enough to oneshot most enemies. When I did use Oolacile magic, I felt pretty dirty because of how easy it is to hit an enemy and forcing them to play extremely offensive without relying on trickery.

Good to hear at least 1 dev or 1 house is thinking about PC the right way. i hate it when games are ported to PC without ever thinking about controls or other important porting aspect. It’s like some company don’t have respect about pc gamers and think they are a plague *cough* Rockstar *cough*

Complaining about games designed for gamepad needing gamepad to play well is a bit silly. Any gamer should have a gamepad in 2013 They’re cheap and not particularly hard to learn to use.. Keyboard and mouse works great for some games and terribly for others.

I think they said the same about the first game as well. But then they changed their minds about that, and it was all for the best. The Artorias of the Abyss DLC was really, really cool with some of the best bosses in the whole game.
Whatever the case, they will definitely keep patching. They’ve done that for both Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.

Hopefully for myself I’ll be fully immersed in Dark Souls 2 (apparently for release in late march and without GfWL) and thus won’t care anymore (having played dozens and dozens of hours of Dark Souls) – but that won’t be everyones situation and it’ll be nice to be able to go back to it feature-complete – i.e. with the multiplayer still intact.

You’d have to be insanely stupid to put GFWL in any game in development right now since Microsoft (note that there is a “S” not a dollar sign because I’m not 14 and besides Apple has gone much farther into pure money-grubbing stunts than they ever have) announced they’re pulling the plug on it. It’d be like developing a game for the 3DO.

Sorry it absolutely is a contender for worst port. A Hard Resolution Lock, a 30 frames cap and a blur filter to hid the (again, hardlocked?!) low resolution. In the goddamn 21st Century? That’s absolutely a criminal port.

The patch helped. Didn’t make it any less wrong that they rushed out a cheap emulation instead of a port, but it made the game actually run properly until GFWL acted up.

It’s good they haven’t taken advantage of the positive reaction to this and made another rush job, assuming people would buy it anyway like last time. There’s several publishers who probably would have.

“For Dark Souls II we are developing on PC from the beginning,” he explained. “We realise what PC games typically require, and I can assure you that the PC version of Dark Souls II will be a good PC experience for PC gamers.”

How many times have we heard that. It seems be in every PR Firms list of stock phrases to use when you want to sell a game on PC. I’m pretty sure we’ve heard that same thing VERBATIM for at least a dozen other games these last years.

At least great news on the no DLC. From Software has been incredibly resilient when it comes to pre-order bullshit and DLC. Hopefully they’ll keep that up.

I’m pretty confident that the PC version will be better in this case. I mean, the only reason we got a PC port for Dark Souls at all was because of an online petition – I think Fromsoft can be forgiven for their failures given the circumstances.

Hmm, well the “Artorias” DLC in the previous game was very good and didn’t feel like something withheld from the main campaign. In fact, it seemed as if the developer used their experience making the main campaign to craft better content afterwards!
How was that a bad thing and why is it good news that it won’t happen again?

This can be a very good thing – instead of filling in plot holes later with a DLC maybe they’ll make sure they tie up any loose story ends in one go. I’d consider that to be a refreshing change from what most games are doing today.